- sendme/ihave protocol.
- flags
- F
- f
- I
- n
- L
- u
- m
- cmds
The use of distributions is a subject of debate. The distribution field in a news article can be created arbitrarily, but for a distribution to be effective, the news servers in the network must know it. Some misbehaving newsreaders create bogus distributions by simply assuming the top-level newsgroup hierarchy of the article destination is a reasonable distribution. For example, one might assume comp to be a reasonable distribution to use when posting to the comp.os.linux.networking newsgroup. Distributions that apply to regions are often questionable, too, because news may travel outside of your region when sent across the Internet.[1] Distributions applying to an organization, however, are very meaningful; e.g., to prevent confidential information from leaving the company network. This purpose, however, is generally served better by creating a separate newsgroup or hierarchy.
This option describes certain parameters for the feed. It may be empty or a combination of the following:
This flag enables batching.
This is almost identical to the F flag, but allows C News to calculate the size of outgoing batches more precisely, and should probably be used in preference.
This flag makes C News produce an article list suitable for use by ihave/sendme. Additional modifications to the sys and the batchparms file are required to enable ihave/sendme.
This creates batch files for active NNTP transfer clients like nntpxmit (see Chapter 22 ). The batch files contain the article's filename along with its message ID.
This tells C News to transmit only articles posted at your site. This flag may be followed by a decimal number n , which makes C News transfer articles posted only within n hops from your site. C News determines the number of hops from the Path: field.
This tells C News to batch only articles from unmoderated groups.
This tells C News to batch only articles from moderated groups.
You may use at most one of F , f , I , or n .
This field contains a command that will be executed for each article, unless you enable batching. The article will be fed to the command on standard input. This should be used for very small feed only; otherwise, the load on both systems will be too high.
The default command is:
uux - -r -z remote-system!rnews
This invokes rnews on the remote system, feeding it the article on standard input.
The default search path for commands given in this field is /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/lib/news/batch . The latter directory contains a number of shell scripts whose names start with via ; they are briefly described later in this chapter.
If batching is enabled using one of the F , f , I , or n flags, C News expects to find a filename in this field rather than a command. If the filename does not begin with a slash (/ ), it is assumed to be relative to /var/spool/news/out.going . If the field is empty, it defaults to remote-system/togo . The file is expected to be in the same format as the remote-system/togo file and contain a list of articles to transmit.
When setting up C News, you will most probably have to write your own sys file. Here is a sample file for vbrew.com , from which you may copy what you need:
# We take whatever they give us.
ME:all/all::
# We send everything we receive to moria, except for local and
# brewery-related articles. We use batching.
moria/moria.orcnet.org:all,!to,to.moria/all,!local,!brewery:f:
#